So, EMC released the NFS plugin for VMWare to support storage administration tasks on Celerra from the VI Client a while back, which was very cool and had some very impressive features.. but what about the Traditional SAN man ?!

The EMC Clariion CX4 is a very flexible box. One of the ways which it enables admins to get the most bang for their buck is by utilising Virtual (Thin) provisioning. This effectivelly enables an admin to create a pool of storage from which smaller volumes of storage (thin LUNs) are provisioned. See below:

(Click Image to enlarge)

Many people will see thin provisioning as the answer to all their problems in terms of storage management.. No. It still needs to be monitored, managed and some intelligent thinking still needs to go into what volumes will be thin provisioned. The EMC Clariion CX4 also has some limitations around thin provisioning.

Each model of Clariion has a limit as to how many drives may be contained in a pool of storage for virtual provisioning, so If you’re thinking of positioning a CX4-120 with one big pool of disks (ie 30 disks) for thin provisioning, think again.. please see below :

Also please bear in mind, that although a disk pool for thin provisioning may contain more drives than RAID allows, the maximum size of a single LUN may not exceed 14TB.

Who am I ?

I work as a Technical Architect for a European Data Centre distributor. The goal of this blog is simply to be a resource for people the want to learn about some of the technologies which make up todays datacentre, be it large or small. I've been working with EMC Storage, Virtualisation, Backup and Cisco UCS technologies for some time now and have a drive to learn and share on various topics related to the above. This Blog will provide information on how specific technologies work, what questions need to be asked in order to qualify certain technology requirements and my two pence on some of these technologies. Ultimately I enjoy technology and count apon other people sharing their knowledge.. so this blog is to try and give back to the IT community where I can.

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